“Hyde Park on Hudson” and History Lessons

When Bill Murray sits facing a camera and says that his name is Herman Blume, we don’t know much—we need the ingenuity of Wes Anderson and his co-writer, Owen Wilson, to let us know what we need to know in order to invest the name with a personality. But when Murray sits facing a camera and tells us that his name is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, history has already done the screenwriter’s job: we know so much about the historical figure that, even in the absence of any action whatsoever, we’re instantly thrust into all sorts of dramas of grand and critical moment. The historical character has as much built-in depth as one’s own prior knowledge lends it, and even a script that reduces a President to a twinkle-eyed philanderer can’t efface the record of political activity that a moderately informed viewer mentally writes in.

That’s one of the reasons why I tend to be relatively forgiving of—or simply tolerant of—movies that depict important characters from history, all the more so if it presents them in an intimate context. Yesterday, I wrote here about cinematic disjunctions of scale, and that’s exactly the effect that small-scale historical dramas exacerbate. So it is with “Hyde Park on Hudson,” which isn’t a very good movie but which offers certain incidental pleasures—not least, Murray’s performance—that are worth calling attention to, particularly with regard (or in contrast) to several other prominent movies of the season.

History is in the air, whether, in overtly political varieties, with “Lincoln,” “Argo,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” as well as in the more blatant fictions of “Django Unchained,” “Les Misérables,” or, for that matter, “The Master,” and, in artistic realms, with “Hitchcock” and “The Girl.” Yesterday, it was announced that the main French movie prize, the Prix Louis-Delluc (more like the National Book Awards than like the Oscars) was awarded to “Farewell My Queen” over a small group of nominees that included the vastly superior “Holy Motors.” History comes with built-in importance and prestige, as well, and it’s where a filmmaker turns in quest of prizes.

“Hyde Park on Hudson” lets us know just enough about Roosevelt’s politics and principles—the engagement of government power to help where private enterprise couldn’t, and the desire to find a way around American isolationism to save Europe from Germany—but no more, and yet, in a strange way, the movie is a drama of political maneuvering no less than is “Lincoln.” The story of the visit by King George VI (the same monarch who was the subject of “The King’s Speech”) and his wife, Elizabeth, to Roosevelt at his mother’s mansion upriver from New York City, is, in essence, that of Roosevelt attempting to sell the defense of Great Britain to the American people. It’s a story of political marketing via media, and it’s fuelled by the deep current of enmity between the British Empire and the breakaway colonies.

Yet it also has another throughline—the story of Daisy Suckley (played by Laura Linney), Roosevelt’s unmarried cousin, whom he summoned to the estate and promptly recruited as a mistress. There’s a scene early on in which Roosevelt drives her down a country road in an empty field and coaxes her to give him a hand job. It’s all we’re ever shown of what’s referred to as their “intimate” relationship, and, though it’s both a little too much, but not nearly enough, it’s a great improvement on the depiction of Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which is prudish and unprobing in its hagiographical view of its subject and which models its ethical crises on Spielberg’s own narrow spectrum. (Can a great President also be a great husband and father?) By contrast, Michell lends Roosevelt, the man, fantasies that were realized and desires that were yielded to; far from trivializing Roosevelt, the movie suggests a powerful paradox that is, today, unpopular—that epochally great, universally admirable deeds can be accomplished by flawed, selfish, cavalier heroes whose private lives may not meet modern ethical standards.

Of course, Steven Spielberg is a far more accomplished director than Roger Michell, who made “Hyde Park on Hudson”—but that very accomplishment is an equivocal virtue. “Lincoln” is a hermetic movie, in which Spielberg’s very precision brings his vision and his ideas unfailingly to the screen. And because Spielberg’s ideas are, though consistent throughout his career, trivializing, the large-scale, big-budget, vastly self-important “Lincoln”—despite its one overwhelming virtue, the text by Tony Kushner, with its majestically intricate language of political legalisms—is actually a less nuanced and less surprising view of its protagonist than is Michell’s relatively lightweight but sophisticated work. Michell doesn’t have Spielberg’s skill; his film has an incidental openness, that of the filmmaker who isn’t good enough to fit things together tightly, but who, as a result, lets in some air. The house may be drafty but it’s not suffocating.

There’s no point to endorsing “Hyde Park on Hudson”—nor, for that matter, to disparaging it. Intelligence and wit take the place of inspiration; a handful of perceptive and memorable details (such as one particularly fine scene between George and Elizabeth involving his stuttering, or the apparent lack of makeup noticeable on the actors, revealing characters’ mottled complexions) stand in for a comprehensive vision. There are basically two kinds of movies—great ones and all the rest—and an excess of attention to mediocrities is one of the occupational hazards of criticism. In distinguishing between them, critics run the risk of becoming connoisseurs of mediocrity and losing the taste for true beauty. Neither “Lincoln” nor “Hyde Park on Hudson” is great; but “Hyde Park on Hudson” has a particular kind of merit. The merit that many of the minor but pleasant films of classic Hollywood offer: it’s a better production than it is a work of art. It conveys something of a transparent experience, suggesting that the power of the subject escapes the attempt to contain it in a film and makes its way directly—albeit incidentally or even accidentally—to the viewer. “Lincoln” yields little but what Spielberg intended; it rises and falls on the oppressive weight of the director’s authority.

Photograph by Nicola Dove/Focus Features.

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